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Scientists will be able to predict cancer resistance to chemotherapy
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Scientists at the Hull Institute (England), led by Lynn Cawkwell, have successfully identified a set of biomarkers that could help predict resistance to chemotherapy treatment in women with breast cancer early. This could help avoid wasting time on unnecessary treatment.
An entire family of proteins has been identified that are at least twice as abundant in samples of chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells as they are in samples taken from women who are successfully undergoing treatment.
Resistance to chemotherapy is a pressing issue for women suffering from certain types of breast cancer. And it's not that the treatment simply doesn't work, that would be half the trouble. It's about wasted time and the side effects of chemotherapy. Until doctors finally learn that medications - one, two, three - can't help, a lot of time will pass, which may not be enough after that. And when you add to this the side effects of chemotherapy drugs (and they are absolutely not limited to dizziness and stomach upset; first of all, we are talking about liver failure, kidney failure and other organs), which will be discovered regardless of the success of the therapy itself, then you can imagine how important it is to predict the possibility of an adverse effect of chemotherapy treatment before it begins.
In a paper published in the Journal of Proteomics, the researchers report identifying a large number of potential biomarkers associated with resistance to commonly used drugs, including epirubicin and docetaxel (a derivative of Taxol).
The scientists used two high-throughput methods to screen breast cancer tissue samples. One method, which uses a variety of antibodies, identified 38 proteins whose concentrations in chemotherapy-resistant patients were twice or more higher than those in unhealthy patients who responded well to treatment. The other method, which relied on a more thorough mass spectrometric analysis procedure, found 57 potential biomarkers, five of which belonged to the 14-3-3 protein family.
The detection of elevated concentrations of 14-3-3 proteins in patients with chemotherapy resistance using two methods undoubtedly demonstrates the special significance of these proteins for developing a clinical method capable of predicting chemo-resistance. (It turns out that the appearance of 14-3-3 proteins where they were not expected at all, or in very high concentrations, has been associated more than once with various unpleasant diseases. For example, their presence in the cerebrospinal fluid indicates the onset of neurodegenerative processes.)
Now scientists want to find out what the real role of these proteins is in the observed chemoresistance. This will be necessary for greater confidence in the reliability of the proposed method of prediction: since we are talking about the life and death of the patient, and every mistake threatens death. In addition to all this, they are going to conduct a similar study to develop a method capable of predicting resistance to radiotherapy.
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